Contributor ⭐️⭐️

Pooled CSM Model

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
December 21, 2018
10 replies
2298 views

We are looking at instrumenting a Pooled CSM Model where a team of CSMs can respond to customers without being assigned to their account specifically. We are familiar with how to do this using Salesforce and creating a ticket queue with email integration, but want to know if we can do something like this in Gainsight. Has anyone done this before and/or explored this option?

courtney_brock

Contributor ⭐️

We have been migrating to this model over the last several years and will be fully implemented by Q1 for our small customer base. Would love to hear success stories or tips for this as well.

ben

Helper ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I have been intrigued by this also, but we are currently not setup this way (currently have specific assignments for all accounts). Would love to connect with anyone who has done this to get some learnings!

-Ben

mark_gecsey

Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

We would be very interested in connecting with someone who has implemented a pooled CSM model.

Mark Gecsey

lane_h

Helper ⭐️

While I have not implemented this, I did sketch out what this might look like in the past.

Instead of having accounts assigned to a specific CSM, you would need to do the following: (This is based on most work would be triggered by CTAs)

Create a user called CSM Pool - The email for this user would need to most likely be a distro list.
Assign the accounts in this tier to the user CSM Pool
When CTAs are created have them assigned to user CSM Pool
Create a customer Cockpit view for CSM Pool accounts
The team then works through the CTAs top to bottom based on how you have configured the Cockpit view.

With this, the team can click out to the C360 views from the Cockpit to get more information about each customer as they are working with them. They should also track Timeline notes within each CTA so others can see information in the CTA if the CTA might have to be picked up by another team member.

Director of CX and Scale Programs

sagan_sherlin

Helper ⭐️⭐️

We actually have this model for two of our Group Accounts. We created a Universal User that is assigned to a bulk of accounts. And then the individual users still have their own access. We've created Dashboards and assisted with creating Cockpit views for them to help not be so overwhelming.

michelle_kim

Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️

For our SMB segment, we essentially have the kind of model that @lane_h has outlined above. I created an "Essentials Team" SFDC user (also a distro) to which we assign accounts and CTAs, but CSMs don't live completely in GS (I'm working through a change management process to move them completely to GS). They have an Essentials team GS dashboard, but we haven't quite migrated to doing a round robin of CTA assignments to the different CSMs. The CSMs do have certain CTA types that an individual CSM will own (for example, John Smith owns all X CTA reason CTAs while Jane Lee owns all Y CTA reason CTAs), but I'm not particularly enamored with this format.

I am going to play around with creating some rules in Rules Engine to assign new CTAs in some sort of round robin format. One of the challenges our org faces is that the Essentials team user is currently assigned:

-SFDC cases

-SFDC tasks

-GS CTAs

-GS Success Plans (Renewals, Adoption, eventually there may be others)

It would be ideal to get the whole picture in terms of how these CSMs interact with customers into GS, but I would need to create a rule for SFDC Cases/Tasks to trigger a corresponding CTA in GS then sync the status updates made in the CTA back to the Case/Task.

Have not yet really dug into whether this will work with Cases (it very well might), but in order to get the Task sync-back from GS to SFDC to work, it will take some additional testing. It's sort of an inception situation where 1. Create task in SFDC -> 2. Possible to automatically trigger GS CTA in order to host the task. Trying to work through how to automatically create the task with the actual task requirements (vs at the CTA subject line level) -> 3. Any updates to GS task/CTA status will not sync back to the original task (tried to leverage the native GS to SFDC task sync, but that didn't work); another option I'm thinking about is just syncing the SFDC task to a unique CTA (vs task within a CTA) where it's a "Task" CTA type.

If anyone has any other suggestions for CS leadership to gain visibility into productivity for a CSM that is part of a pooled resource, it would be appreciated! If there is a simpler solution to the above issues, please share... when I took the issue to GS Admin office hours, I got some validation that my proposed solution would work, but I haven't had an opportunity to test in more detail.

caroline_margraf

Contributor ⭐️

Rather delayed to this- but I would be interested in connecting with anyone who has something similar launched!

I have the logistics worked out- I’m more interested to hear about metric adjustments, etc.

ashleyunity

Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️

We implemented a pooled CSA model (based on region/ARR) last year to great effect. I’d love to share our experience and hear from others who have done the same!

jean.nairon

Expert ⭐️

Hi everyone,

We just recently implemented something similar for a Gainsight customer. We did something similar to what was described above. This was solution was used for a low touch CS team which had a high volume of accounts per CSM (in the 1000’s per CSM range).

Here’s what we did:

We created a new user called CS Pool. We set up the email as a distribution list so that it would notify everyone in the pool whenever Gainsight sent a notification.
We assigned all low touch accounts to this CSM Pool user.
All CTAs are automatically assigned to the CSM Pool user and we used reports, dashboards, and the Cockpit for CSMs to see when a new CTA was created.
Once the CTA is created, it was up to the CSMs to pick it up and assign it to themselves. Managers were also able to triage the queue and assign CTAs to CSMs if needed.

For this solution, if a CTA was still assigned to the CSM Pool user, it meant a CSM wasn’t working on it yet. We used CSM assignment as the first step for the team to know if something was being worked on. This helped us keep the queue in order.

For this solution, CSMs were self-assigned. In Salesforce, reps are auto-assigned in a round robin. This would have been ideal in Gainsight but there’s nothing out-of-the-box to deliver this. We looked at building rules but we decided not to down this path because it would have been complex to maintain. Salesforce’s assignment rules allow for people working in different timezones and regions. I think its potentially possible to build this in rules but you would need to make sure its well maintained when there are staff changes.

Jean